Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX by Sara Fitzgerald (review)

As we near the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 law known as Title IX, which banned sex discrimination in federally funded education, the stories of its origins in the women's movement of the 1960s and early 1970s resonate. Sara Fitzgerald gives a detailed account of the struggle at one institution in Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX. Her deep dive into an early and important local struggle illustrates the kinds of battles waged by many women in higher education across the country as the 1970s dawned.

It wasn't easy, Fitzgerald shows us. Every step of the way, women faced intense opposition from the men who ran universities, buoyed by their sister activists and incremental progress engineered by federal regulators.

Federal involvement made Michigan's case stand out. The initial chapters describe how Ann Arbor activists led by attorney Jean King (one of few woman lawyers at that time) sent a letter to Labor Secretary George Shultz in May 1970 complaining of widespread discrimination against University of Michigan women employees or women seeking admission to graduate programs. King, like many women around the country, had been inspired by Bernice Sandler, who filed hundreds of complaints starting in January 1970 after she figured out that colleges and universities were subject to an executive order banning sex discrimination by federal contractors.

Shultz turfed the complaints to the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare. HEW already was investigating race discrimination in some institutions, so it tacked on its first examinations of institution-wide sex discrimination at private Harvard University, followed by the public University of Michigan.

Several chapters set the events at Michigan in the context of campus unrest across the nation. The heart of the book, though, closely follows the Michigan investigation: The harm done to individual women. The inability of men in charge to recognize this as a problem. Administrators' refusal to cooperate with federal investigators. And finally, the government's willingness to use the only pressure at its disposal to compel compliance—delay or cancellation of contracts. When some of Michigan's $7.5 million in federal contracts started disappearing (approximately $52.5 million in 2021 dollars), so did much of the university's resistance.

But far from all of it. The final chapters detail four years of gamesmanship by the university, toying with HEW's understaffed Office for Civil Rights by missing deadlines, arguing with requirements, and more. New laws piled on that gradually forced change at Michigan, like Title IX in 1972 and a 1979 state amendment mandating public disclosure of salaries at state-supported colleges.

The national context of feminist academic uprisings and federal enforcement in which the Michigan struggle developed deserves deeper discussion than readers will find here. Women at Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, and many other universities launched similar campaigns prior to or contemporaneous with Michigan's. The book mentions the start of a Women's Studies Program at Michigan; similar programs sprouted at dozens of colleges in the 1970s. The Office for Civil Rights first withheld contracts from Harvard to force compliance with the executive orders, then Michigan, and subsequently elsewhere. By the time Title IX arrived with the same potential penalty, schools knew the risk of losing funding was real.

Conquering Heroines fleshes out one university's struggles in detail that would be lost in a broader treatment. It provides important state history with national ramifications and gives local heroines the credit they're due.